prints from digital

[PapaBob]

Several months ago I took some digital images I had burned onto a CD to a local Costco. I shot them in Adobe RGB colorspace and edited them in Photoshop in the same colorspace using a calibrated monitor. When I got the pics back the had a pronounced color shift. The tech at Costco remarked "most people who edit their images screw them up, they should leave the camera images alone." Since some of the images had not been edited but still had the same color shift, so the tech’s answer did not please me. The Costco prints from another disk with jpeg images shot in sRGB color space did not have the color cast. Most digital cameras take pictures in the sRGB color space and I believe this is the way the Costco machines are set.

The start for faithful prints is a calibrated monitor. If yours is not calibrated then what you see on your screen may not be true color. In that case the blue cast may be at your end. In your defense, I do not know how often Costco calibrates their machines. When I asked that question of the tech, I got a look like I had grown a second head. Professional graphic artists will get an ICC profile from their printing house and use software like Photoshop to make sure the printer can match the colors in their screen image. When I asked the Costco tech if they had an ICC printer profile I could use, I got a look like I had grown a third head.

I agree with the other suggestions. Seek out a lab that specializes in digital image printing. They can help you solve your problem, and any extra expense is worth it.

—Bob

 

[Charlie99]

... I shot them in Adobe RGB colorspace and edited them in Photoshop in the same colorspace using a calibrated monitor. When I got the pics back the had a pronounced color shift.

......... The Costco prints from another disk with jpeg images shot in sRGB color space did not have the color cast. Most digital cameras take pictures in the sRGB color space and I believe this is the way the Costco machines are set.

....... When I asked the Costco tech if they had an ICC printer profile I could use, I got a look like I had grown a third head.

Perhaps the choice of Adobe vs sRGB color space is what caused the problems for SDunbar.

I've always used jpeg images in sRGB clolor space for the stuff I've had printed by Fuji machines.

www.drycreekphoto.com has ICC profiles for many specific digital labs, including a lot of the Costo locations. You can get download test files to print at your local lab, which dry creek photo will then measure to get the ICC profile for your local lab. I haven't bothered to do so, since using standard sRGB w/o ICC corrections has been close enough.

ScubaBObuba, did you request any sort of special processing such as "no color correction"? So far, I just let my pix go through with standard processing.

The other possibility is that the tech interpreted "no color correction" such that he turned off some basic system calibration correction factors rather than just turning off any "picture enhancement" type of features.

 

[SDunbar]

The saga continues:

I talked to a very nice tech at Costco last night. She said to bring in a CD with just the "problem" shots and we'd play around with it. (There's probably about 25 "blue" shots and 20 cropped that I want redone -- I'll live the others, or the others are fine.)

She said to order 3 x 5s, and that should help the current shots come out okay. We'll see. Then she thought maybe the "color correction" either shouldn't have been turned off, or maybe the tech. just didn't do it. So we'll see. She was very nice, and thought it would be fun to try to figure out how to fix it.

At least most of my climbing/backpacking/topside vacation shots were mostly okay.

Thanks for all the info. I'll be playing around with shots taken backpacking in the Trinity Alps (that's in No. Calif.) during this week -- if work doesn't get in the way!

 

[PapaBob]

Charlie:

Good question! I went back and looked at the prints. The CMY code was NNN meaning no color correction which is what I think I had asked for. The pics were shot with a Canon 300D which allows you to shoot images in Adobe RGB which is supposed to give you better color gamut than sRGB. I dont know what SDunbar was shooting but, like I said, most digital cameras use the sRGB color space. You raise a good point. If the Costco equipment was not set for WYSIWYG then maybe it was doing "above water" color and contrast adjustments to Dunbar's underwater images. I am VERY interested in the results of his meeting with his Costco tech produce and ask him to keep us informed. It sounds like he has a helpful person which was not my experience.

---Bob

 

[SDunbar]

Last week I was finally able to make it into my Costco and actually spend a bit of time with a woman from the photo processing lab. Just by luck, I found a person who not only wanted to help me, but also wanted to learn herself. (Kudos to Mary at the Redding, CA Costco.)

I segregated my "problem" prints into three piles: too blue, too cropped, and a few that had both problems. I wrote the numbers of the dig. pic. on the back so they would correspond to the three files on a CD where I had also copied the "problem" shots.

Mary took the too-cropped ones and printed them small enough to capture the entire shot. Now, I've got some trimming to do since they have white that needs to be cut off since I had not cropped to the correct dimensions. But she was able to zoom out on the shot so nothing was lost. I've been taking a PhotoShop course the past couple of weeks, so hopefully I can avoid this problem in the future.

With the too-blues, she ran them at a -9 cyan. She was surprised there was ANY blue left in the pic.; however, unfortunately the blues were still overly pronounced. They were definitely better, but still not what I see on any computer monitor. I do still have the original shots, so I may play around with them. Once again, I'm sure the problems were caused by my error since this was my very first journey into the digital photo realm, not to speak of my first time working with PhotoShop Elements and/or Album. I've really been learning a lot -- and have SO much more to learn.

Just to tie this up: Mary didn't even charge me for the work she did on these prints; said they were just redos. There are still some good guys/gals out there that go the extra mile for the customer!

 

[Charlie99]

Now, I've got some trimming to do since they have white that needs to be cut off since I had not cropped to the correct dimensions.

With the too-blues, she ran them at a -9 cyan. She was surprised there was ANY blue left in the pic.; however, unfortunately the blues were still overly pronounced.

Just cranking down the blue or cyan won't help a lot of shots. Fortunately, Photoshop and Photoshop Elements have a real nifty feature called color cast (On PE it's Enhance | Adjust Color | Color Cast)

On a large percentage of my blue shots; color cast, followed by an autolevels will get pretty close, even if the result after the color cast operator is rather grayed out. If the autolevels is too agressive and the ocean turns pinkish, then manual levels adjustment on the color cast layer is likely to work.

And you can always back off on the opacity of the manual levels layer to let back in some of the original blue and to reduce unaturally high contrast

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For cropping, I just set the crop tool to 4" x 6" with a blank in the resolution to avoid resampling, and then crop just a smidgen outside of what I want to show. It seems that most shops run their machines overzoomed a tiny bit to compensate for possible paper misalignment--- this causes about 1/8" to be cropped out on each edge
.
You can easily check how much your shop is overzooming by going to Image | Resize |Canvas Size and adding 0.1 to 0.2 inches of white border to a couple of photos before your next print job.

Good luck in your photoshop class.

Charlie

 

[SDunbar]

Thanks for the info., Charlie. In fact, I'm working on exactly the things you mentioned in the class I'm taking. I may take a few of my "problem" shots and play around with the hues on the blues in the next class. (Hmmm, sounds like a good name for a blues tune -- also one of my vices.)

Great feedback from everyone.